Testing mode setting support is quite simple. If your system boots and starts X properly in the correct resolution, it's working. If it doesn't, then try booting with the <tt>nomodeset</tt> kernel parameter: this disables kernel mode setting. If that works, then KMS is problematic on your card. Please [http://bugzilla.redhat.com file a bug] on the problem, and - if you're here on the test day - say so on IRC. Also, fill in the results table: see below.

Make sure to back up your existing xorg.conf file, if you have one, so you can recover if the testing causes you trouble

no animals will be hurt during testing

How to test?

Update your machine

See the instructions on the Rawhide page on the various ways in which you can install or update to Rawhide.

Testing

Things to test, roughly in dependency order:

Kernel modesetting

When booting, the system should jump into
graphics mode as soon as the initrd loads, that is, a few seconds
after the bios messages stop. KMS should generally pick the native
resolution for your monitor, if it doesn't, that's a bug. A
minimal test that modesetting is working is to remove rhgb from the
command line and add 3 to boot into text mode. If KMS works, you
should have a text mode with a lot more character cells than the
standard 80x25 and it will be a little slower. If KMS doesn't
work, it can be disabled by passing nomodeset on the kernel command
line.

Plymouth

When booting, there should be a blinky text cursor for a
few seconds after the bios messages finish and then we should jump
into KMS graphics mode. Plymouth will then take over and draw a
progress animations, which should last until the X server and GDM
starts up. GDM should cross fade in from the boot graphics.
Specifically, there should be no modesetting flicker of blackout,
unless you have an second/external monitor connected, in which case
X may change the mode. Plymouth on dualhead gives interesting
results, typically black borders on one or both displays. Plymouth
cheat-codes: Ctrl-T goes to text mode, Ctrl-V enables verbose mode.

xrandr, external monitors, hotplug

There's a couple of things to
test in this area. First of all, since we're using KMS, all
modesetting goes through the kernel. While the kernel code is just
the X code ported to the kernel, it is more or less a brand new
code path and it as such it will have new bugs and the integration
between X and kernel is also fairly new code. So even if KMS and
plymouth comes up, X may still fail to start or come up in a
different resolution than plymouth. Verify that the monitor fades
down and does DPMS off correctly for the screensaver. Second, we
now (finally) can resize the framebuffer when a new monitor is
plugged in. You should no longer need the Virtual line in the
xorg.conf, in fact, if it's there it may crash X. For i965 and up
hardware, the limit is 8192x8192 pixels, for everything older it's
2048x2048. The gnome-display-properties tool is our recommended
tool for configuring the connected monitors and works fairly well
at this point. It may be necessary to fall back to the xrandr
command line tool though. If you're using the
gnome-display-properties tool, you probably want to uncheck the
"Mirror screens" check box to be able to put the screen
side-by-side. After un-mirroring, click the monitors icons to
adjust the resolution individually. Gotchas: TV outputs are
disabled because they otherwise always show up, some chipsets may
detect non-existing monitors. Panels and other desktop items may
bounce around unexpectedly or fail to adjust to the new screen
size; that's also a bug, but outside the scope of this exercise.

DRI2/GLX

This enables GLXPixmaps, GLXPbuffers, GL framebuffer
objects and other GL/GLX features. It's a little hard to test
since not many apps use these features. What is testable is GLX
under a compositing manager, which comes down to: run a compositing
manager, then run glxgears (from glx-utils) or another GL
application (blender, tuxracer, uh, other stuff). Then verify that
the GL applications behave as any other window, that is, that they
stack correctly below other windows, wobble, spin on the cube (if
your compositing manager provides a spinning cube).

Xv

Support for X video under KMS. Quick test is to launch
gstreamer-properties, go to the video tab, pick the Xv plugin, run
the test and confirm the test pattern comes up. Bigger test case:
watch a movie with totem or other movie player, make sure it's
using Xv. Test that video works correctly with a compositing
manger as described for GLX above.

Fast user switching

This is essentially testing running two X
servers at the same time. Create a test user if you don't already
have one, click your username in the top right corner to get the
switch user menu, select "Switch User", at the GDM screen login as
the other user, then do the same thing to switch back to the first
user. Verify that GLX and Xv (as above) works on both X servers.

VT switching

Testing that we can switch back to a KMS console and
login and then back. Press Ctrl-Alt-F2 (X is on VT1) to get a text
mode login, verify that that works, then jump back to X with
Alt-F1.

Suspend/Resume

Suspend, verify that the system comes back up on
resume. Combine with playing movies/GLX as aboe for extra LOLZ.

Docking stations

Smoke'em if you got'em.

Report your results

Once you have completed the tests, add your results to the Results table below, following the example results from Adam Williamson as a template. The first column should be your name with a link to your User page in the Wiki if you have one, and the second should be a link to your Smolt hardware profile (see above for a link with instructions on submitting your hardware profile to Smolt). For each test case, if your system worked correctly, simply enter the word PASS. If you had trouble, enter the word FAIL, as a link to the bug report for the failure. In the comments column, you can enter the model name and PCI device ID (vendor ID is usually 10DE) of your card, if you know it - you can usually find this information in the output of the command lspci -nn.